The One I Was (24 page)

‘Wouldn’t you agree?’ the consultant asked me.

I lifted my head from the pad. The ward wasn’t the stationary structure it ought to be: it was spinning slowly. And now the floor was rippling as though it was molten. I could hear a ringing sound.

‘Are you all right?’ The consultant glared at me.

I started explaining that I was dizzy and needed air, but by then it seemed as though all the oxygen in the room had rushed out, leaving me breathless. I slid gently onto the lino-covered floor, which continued to judder and ripple beneath me.

*

They told me it was a panic attack. They wanted me to look for triggers, have counselling.

‘We know about the terrible thing that happened to your mother.’ The counsellor at my initial session spoke very softly. ‘Your father spoke to us. Have you ever talked to anyone about it?’

I shook my head.

‘Would you like to do that with me?’

She was kind. I liked her. Perhaps it would have helped. But I couldn’t afford to revisit the fire; I needed it tucked safely in my memory where it couldn’t overwhelm me.

I packed my bags and wrote a letter telling them I’d changed my mind about taking my medical career any further. And went to New York for six months so that they couldn’t get in touch with me. Before I left I told my father I had found the shifts as a junior doctor too exhausting and the continual studying for examinations too demanding. He’d looked at me with pain clear in his eyes.

‘I should never have gone to Saudi Arabia that year,’ he said. ‘If I’d been in the country I could have intervened, taken you away from Fairfleet and that man.’

But that would have left Mum entirely alone with Cathal. Dad must have seen how I felt about that.

‘You and Andrew felt you had to take care of your mother, didn’t you, Rose?’

‘Yes.’ And we had failed to do this. Me, particularly.

‘You could have gone far as a doctor,’ Dad said sadly.

*

I could have gone far, perhaps, but I hadn’t done so badly in my preferred career, even if my private life had been a bit of a disaster, until James had come along.

James. Shut away with Benny, I’d allowed myself to forget about James between phone calls and texts. I’d told myself it was me who was in pain, because of our recent loss. But he would have been feeling it too. I looked at my patient. Benny had nodded off in his chair. I allowed myself to further consider my life.

After my marriage failed I’d drifted from one short relationship to another. And then I’d met James. Despite, or perhaps because of, our combined sad histories – he being a recent widower – James and I had hit it off. And he’d moved in. Perhaps the moving in hadn’t been such a good idea.

‘There’s something provisional about you, Rosamond.’ He’d looked around my spacious flat. ‘You’ve never really settled down, have you? Where are your books? Your furniture?’

‘I don’t like clutter.’

‘You could buy up most of Heals and put it in this flat and still have room for a football pitch.’

‘I like it like this.’

‘Perhaps it’s this way because you’re always travelling.’

Something in his expression made me feel uncomfortable. ‘I’ve enjoyed moving around the world, seeing different places.’

‘Yes.’ He was still staring at me. I started to feel annoyed.

‘Regretting moving in with me?’

‘No. I just wonder how easy you’ll find it, that’s all.’

‘I’ll enjoy it.’ And I had, though it was strange to have James there every evening, to have his books, pictures, clothes and saucepans in my space. But we’d wobbled on together. Until the day I discovered, aged forty, that I was unexpectedly pregnant. Nine weeks gone, in fact.

When I broke the news neither of us said anything for a whole minute. ‘I thought it was just my age,’ I said at last. ‘I mean, forty!’

‘Catherine’s twenty.’ James gulped. I knew he was wondering how on earth he’d break it to his adult daughter that she was going to have a sibling.

I went to open the fridge and retrieve the Chablis. Reminding myself I couldn’t drink any more, I poured a glass for James. I sipped at a glass of tap water while I tried to process the news. ‘How can I have been pregnant for two months and not known?’

‘I thought you were looking a bit peaky.’ James took a long drink from his glass. ‘But you had that difficult job.’

I’d had a non-residential job a long drive from home. The hours had been long and the patient’s house was kept very warm. I’d frequently felt nauseous.

‘What are we going to do?’ I looked around the apartment. ‘I mean, a baby, in here?’

The nearest park was at least fifteen minutes away. I had a balcony, though. With a ten-storey drop.

He took my hand. ‘We’ll do just what you want us to do, Rosamond.’

I went through the next few weeks swinging from complete rejection of the prospect of becoming a mother to a kind of fierce joy. By the end of the ninth week of my pregnancy the latter emotion was winning. James and I agreed to look for a new house. We’d sell both our homes and find something suitable for a new family of three. Something manageable, but with a garden. At the end of week eleven I was beginning to feel less nauseous. A scan showed that the baby was developing well. I rang my father and Andrew. Their delight showed just how much they’d wanted this for me. I’d been worried about how Catherine would respond to the prospect of a much younger sibling, but she seemed to take the news in her stride, hugging me when we met for lunch.

A day later I started to bleed.

‘Perhaps you should think of counselling.’ We sat in my empty flat the next day, James holding my hand.

Perhaps I should. I hadn’t lasted long with the counsellor I’d seen after my breakdown on the ward. She’d been kind and no doubt competent but I’d backed out. But, on the bright side, I hadn’t completely fallen to bits. So I’d manage this time round, too. The loss of a less than 12-week-old embryo, something who wasn’t really a person, couldn’t compare to the bigger loss I’d suffered.

So I told myself. I took a month off work and then this job came up. I’d tried to resist, but Fairfleet had exerted too strong a pull.

*

Benny half-woke and seemed to be feeling discomfort. I checked the time.

‘You need to take your medication. Let’s get you settled.’ I helped make him comfortable and he fell back asleep almost as soon as he’d swallowed the tablets. I wondered how much he’d remember of our conversation when he woke up. Perhaps he wouldn’t care as much as I worried he would. If he liked the adult Rosamond Hunter, if she was doing her job well, he’d forgive the deception I’d carried out. Or, if not deception, the sin of omission I’d committed in not making it clear that Rosamond Hunter and Rose Madison were the same person.

I switched on my phone to look again at the photographs of Granny and Mum. The latter on the front steps as a young woman, smiling into the camera, years away still from the mental illness that was moving to claim her. Granny climbing out of a plane, wearing her beloved flying jacket, hair pinned back, radiant. I might have expected the photographs to make me feel sad, nostalgic, at least. But they didn’t, perhaps because I’d unburdened myself
to Benny. And because I’d allowed myself to think about the miscarriage. I felt as I imagined Catholics did after confessing sins to a priest: physically lighter, airy, almost.

I went downstairs to wash and refill Benny’s water jug and tumblers. The snow-clearer would probably be grateful for a hot drink. I prepared a coffee for him and put on boots and coat to find him. He was sitting on a section of low wall by the back terrace, staring out towards the lake. He turned as I approached. His eyes were less red today. The deep blue was more marked.

Some of the coffee slopped out of the mug onto the snow, melting its purity and leaving a stain.

‘You,’ I said.

‘Hello, Rosebud,’ Cathal Pearse said.

28

Cathal took the mug from my shaking hand. ‘Careful, you’re spilling it. Quite a coincidence, both of us showing up at Fairfleet.’

‘No coincidence at all. You saw me in Oxford, on Cornmarket when I was shopping and you grabbed at me. Then you tracked me here.’ I struggled to control the shake in my voice.

He took a mouthful of coffee and breathed out warm air. The vapour hung around us like a bad dream.

‘So? It’s a free country. I’m doing a good job.’ He nodded at the path he’d cleared around the back of the house.

‘Why are you here?’

‘I just wanted to see the old place. Look at what could have been mine.’

‘Yours?’

‘Your mother and I had plans for Fairfleet. I could still have been teaching here now. If it hadn’t been for you, Rosie.’

‘She was never going to let you turn it into a tutorial college.’

‘She signed the papers.’

‘She changed her mind.’

He shrugged. ‘You and your brother couldn’t have the place anyway. All those death duties. You didn’t think about that when you killed your own mother.’

‘Get the hell out of here!’ My body was in panic mode: perspiration running down my neck, my stomach churning.

He took another lazy sip of coffee before answering. ‘I’ll take my orders from Sarah Smith, thanks all the same. She wants me here every day clearing snow while the bad weather lasts.’ He handed me the mug. ‘So the doctor can get up the drive if it looks like the old man’s pegging it.’

‘If she knew who you were –’

‘Does she know who
you
are?’ He leered. ‘She doesn’t, does she?’

‘Tell her your arm is hurting you and go.’

‘What would happen if Sarah found out you were here under false pretences?’ he said. ‘Would she throw you out, Rosebud?’

‘I am not here under false pretences. I’m using my legal name.’

‘You damaged me seriously when you hit me.’ He put a hand to the side of his head.

‘Even your own lawyers said you hadn’t a chance of making me responsible for what happened to you. The police didn’t agree with your version of events, either.’

‘You were a child, Rosie, a wicked and violent child. But they didn’t want to think the worst of you. Someone had to be the scapegoat for everything and they chose me. Strange, when I wasn’t the one who lit the match and started the fire. And when I was trying to help your mother.’

‘It didn’t look like help, it looked like a drunk trying to hinder our attempts.’ I started to walk away, telling myself not to break into a run, not to show him my fear.

‘You drove me to drink,’ he shouted. ‘I’d given it up before I went to Fairfleet.’

I ignored him.

‘You’re probably sorry I didn’t die,’ he called after me. ‘Pity for you they put out the fire before it could burn me to ashes, too.’ And now I was running, feet sliding on the snow.

‘I could still bring a claim against you, you know,’ he shouted. ‘For ruining my life with the injuries you inflicted on me.’

I slammed the kitchen door closed and rammed the bolts over, my shaking hands making the job hard. He couldn’t get into the house through the locked front door. I was safe from him inside. But for how long? I sank into one of the kitchen chairs, hands over my face. Once again the mask had slipped and I was no longer Rosamond Hunter, forty-year-old nurse, calm, composed and professional. I was Rose Madison, not yet thirteen. With a bipolar mother who couldn’t rid herself of the influence of a man with a major personality defect. A charming narcissist with violent and controlling, possibly psychopathic tendencies. These were the descriptions the adult me had come up with to describe Cathal. The child me hadn’t known any of these terms.

I’d just known that Cathal was dangerous.

And the child still inside me knew that I couldn’t be here at Fairfleet while he remained.

29

Sarah came into the kitchen carrying clean drying-up cloths and dishcloths. ‘I’m always amazed how many of these I get through at Christmas.’ She stared at me. ‘Rosamond?’

‘The snow-sweeper.’ I swallowed. I had a decision to make. I could tell her exactly why I feared him, who he was, why he’d come to Fairfleet. Or I could just make up some other story about him, make him sound like a nutcase who was no specific threat to me, but wasn’t the sort of person you wanted round a house containing two women and a very ill elderly man.

‘What about him?’

‘He’s …’ I swallowed. ‘Listen, Sarah, this is going to sound mad. But he knows me, and I know him.’

She put down the pile of clean cloths she was holding. ‘What do you mean?’

‘I used to live here, Sarah, years ago. It used to be my grandmother’s house.’ I watched her, expecting her to look surprised. She gave a little nod.

‘I suspected you’d stayed here once. You seemed to know too much about the house, where cupboards were, where there were high beams to duck. Things nobody would know if they hadn’t lived here before. But Benny was happy with you.’

‘I thought you wouldn’t let me take the job if you knew.’

She shrugged. ‘Perhaps not. But you’re here now.’ Her expression turned more serious. ‘But I can’t let you bring old family history in to trouble Benny, you understand, Rosamond? What’s all this about the snow-sweeper?’

‘He wriggled his way into my mother’s life when she was vulnerable.’ I told Sarah about Cathal’s arrival at the house, his exploitation of Mum’s mental frailty, the way he’d driven out Smithy, the violence we’d seen unleashed little by little.

She listened in silence. ‘Should I call the police?’

‘I’d like to,’ I said. ‘But they couldn’t find anything to charge him with all those years ago and I can’t see anything has changed. He hasn’t done anything wrong here.’

‘Other than frighten you.’

‘He’d probably deny it.’

‘I’ll tell him to leave,’ she said. ‘He can have his money and go. I just don’t want trouble, Rosamond.’

‘No.’

She took her purse from the kitchen table and put on boots and coat.

‘Do you want me to come out with you?’ I asked.

‘Probably best if I do it alone.’ She sounded grimly determined. ‘I’ve had some experience of letting people go over the years. It happens. Cooks who drink, cleaners who don’t clean, gardeners who sit in the shed and smoke dope, I’ve dealt with all the clichés, and more. Don’t worry about this pathetic specimen, he’ll go.’